Charles Emmerson starts his account of 1913 much as you would expect. The setting is the world fair at Ghent. Visitors from every nation in the world throng the stands, marvelling at the ingenuity of modern man. Business cards get swapped, order books filled. The mood is open and curious, with conversations shifting easily between languages. The talk might be about British ball bearings, Flemish lace or Portuguese wine. Later, over a coffee or beer, someone may mention the recent royal wedding attended by a full sweep of royal cousins: George of Britain, Nicholas of Russia and Wilhelm of Germany. Here is cosmopolitanism showing its sunniest face to the world: mild, pragmatic and touchingly convinced that it is doing its best by everyone.

This is just the sort of opening scene we are used to in narratives that begin in 1913 – a more sophisticated version of the summer garden party in which girls in white frocks play croquet on a vicarage lawn. We know that in the very next beat the sky will darken, the music will go atonal, and the bright colours will drain to sepia as the guns move in. But Emmerson does not give us that next beat. For it is not his intention to describe how or why the Great War began. Instead, he wants us to continue to potter among the stalls at Ghent, experiencing what it felt like to be alive in 1913, unaware of the coming rip in history.

To further decentre the war from his narrative, he takes us on a tour that includes places apparently aloof from the approaching carnage. What, for instance, was it like to be a beef baron in Buenos Aires, a wine merchant in Algiers or a tyre manufacturer in Tokyo? Actually, it turns out, it wasn't all that different from being a clerk in London or a banker in Berlin. In the newly joined-up world of 1913, information, artefacts and people hurtled around the world at dizzying speeds. The report of a poor wheat harvest in Canada meant a fall on the stock market in London the next day. Model T Fords struck out from Detroit to do sterling service in the coffee plantations of Brazil and the sheep farms of New Zealand. Russia, far from stewing in its own juices, was publishing books in 49 languages.

Emmerson is able to make his case about globalisation by arguing that 1913 was the year the world finally turned urban. From China to Brazil, men and women were pouring into the expanding towns to remake their lives. Citizens, fresh from the country, encounter new jobs, new drinks, new dances, even new kinds of bodies. In Peking, dawdling citizens are even told to stand up straight and walk faster if they really want to get on.

Not everyone enjoyed being modern. Naysayers grumbled that the world now turned so fast that it would soon spin off its axis. In Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, you could buy "Parisian" scarves made in Manchester, Nestlé's condensed milk from Switzerland and Russian galoshes. Tokyo's new railway station was modelled on Amsterdam Centraal while Bombay's Victoria station showed a puzzling resemblance to London's St Pancras. Shanghai's Customs House, meanwhile, was built in a style best described as Tudorbethan.

While electricity now lit up the main streets in Tehran and Algiers, it only served to make the side streets seem darker than before, and 1913 turned into a year of frightening shadows. In Vienna a Jewish clerk was arrested on a trumped-up charge of ritual murder. In Russia, whispering the word "constitution" on the freezing air was still enough to bring a policeman to your door. In other parts of the world, protesters marched and waved placards. A British-trained lawyer called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi rallied Indian miners in Natal against laws designed to squeeze them into ghettoes. Such was the speed with which news travelled that Indians on the subcontinent were soon joining in to protest this attack on their cherished right to move freely around the British Empire. In Palestine, things quickly turned nasty. Fanned by newspapers, sectarian tensions increased to the point where a banal incident involving the theft of some grapes was enough to trigger a murderous street brawl between Arabs and Jews.

Particularly striking are the literary sources Emmerson uses to recreate the world of 100 years ago (and remember it's all recent: there are 13,000 people in the UK today who were alive in 1913). Rather than high literature, he mostly opts for demotic texts, journalism and hack novels, to get a feel for the splits and bumps that marked private and public thinking. So instead of Proust, DH Lawrence and Freud, we have the intelligent but non-canonical work of Stefan Zweig and Israel Zangwill. A chapter on Mexico City makes great use of a potboiler called Philip Dru, written by Woodrow Wilson's Texan adviser Edward M House, in which Mexico is incorporated into the US, a move that seemed entirely likely at the time. To understand how the inhabitants of Detroit felt about their homes, Emmerson uses a Sears catalogue, while Los Angeles's fantasies about its own past are mapped on to a Mary Pickford movie.

Throughout this ambitious, subtle account, Emmerson tries hard not to play the hindsight game. Still, he's honest enough to acknowledge the cheap pleasure that comes from knowing what happens next. For who would not be tickled to learn that in 1913 Kaiser Wilhelm was being hailed as a glorious peacemaker, with 25 conflict-free years under his considerable belt? Or that until recently a young Mussolini had been running a socialist group in Trieste while Trotsky was busy as a journalist in the tinkling tea shops of Vienna? Then there are those startling contemporary resonances, such as the moment when Elizabeth Kendall, a global flâneur, declares: "China is waking up, the self-satisfied complacency of the white race has received a shock".

Not all the prophecies made in 1913 turn out to be quite as spot-on as Kendall's, though. India, according to a piece in the Evening Standard, would probably never wish to be independent of Britain. The Channel Tunnel was confidently declared to be only a few years away. Oddest of all, however, was the suggestion that, by the year 2013, the capital city of the British empire would have been obliged to relocate to somewhere along the Canadian-US border. Such wild mis-hits are worth cherishing as a reminder that the future is never simply the present dressed up in a funny haircut. A hundred years from now we – or at least the very youngest among us – will be doing and thinking things that are quite unguessable now. And, actually, the idea of that is really rather cheering.

• Kathryn Hughes is writing a book about famous Victorians' body parts. To order 1913: The World Before the Great War for £20 with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop